AI: Mixed Feelings, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Most of us who use AI tools live with a quiet contradiction: the tools are genuinely useful, and using them raises real ethical problems — work that might have gone to a person, the energy and water that data centers consume, and models trained on creators' content that was never paid for. This episode of The Psych Files sits in that uncomfortable middle and asks what psychology can tell us about it, drawing on Festinger's cognitive dissonance, the trivialization research of Simon, Greenberg, and Brehm, Bandura's moral disengagement, and Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning to show how we quietly talk ourselves into staying comfortable. Along the way Michael turns the lens on himself — as someone whose own YouTube videos have been scraped to train these systems — weighs whether local AI models actually resolve any of the ethical problems, and lands on the idea that the discomfort may be worth keeping rather than rushing to explain away.